After grumbling countless times thinking ‘why isn’t lodash preloaded as soon as start my node repl?!’, I bit the bullet and quickly hacked up a script to do just that. After perusing the repl doc, this is what I came up with.

Ok fine, I should have mentioned that your packages should be installed globally in the first place. The npm install switch is -g in case you forgot.

$ npm install -g lodash

You need to have NPM_HOME set in your PATH. Also, it would have been neat if I could have got a npm root -g equivalent to get the npm_modules path instead of all the string munging.

To put the script in my PATH, I created an nrepl file in /usr/local/bin (I can see my clojure friends smirking). Of course, you got to change permissions too silly.

$ chmod u+x nrepl
$ mv nrepl /usr/local/bin

And to see if everything works.

$ nrepl
> lodash.each
[Function]

Yay!